The Swan Thieves

And then one day I saw Robert again, alone, just at the end of the semester. Our class had concluded with a little party in the studio, and he had graciously seen us all out the door at the end, bestowing special notice on no one and a smile of pride on everyone; we'd done better, all of us, he confessed, than he'd ever thought we could. I was walking to the library a few days later, during exam week, and I turned up a petal-strewn walk and almost bumped against him.

"Fancy running into you here," he said, stopping abruptly and holding out his long arm as if to catch me, or to prevent me from actually colliding with him. His hand closed over my upper arm. It sounded more intimate than he'd probably meant, but then I had almost barreled into his rib cage.

"Literally," I added, and was gratified when he laughed heartily, something I hadn't seen before. He threw back his head a little; he was lost in the pleasure of it, unself-conscious. It was a happy sound--I laughed, too, when I heard it. We stood there contentedly under the spring trees, an older person and a younger person whose work together was done. Because of that, there was nothing to say, and yet we stood there, smiling, because it was a warm day and the long upstate winter hadn't scuttled our differing dreams, and because the semester was about to end and release everyone-- a transition, a relief. "I'm going to take that painting workshop in the summer term," I said to fill up the pleasant silence. "Thanks again for your recommendation." And then I remembered: "Oh, I went to see the gallery show. I loved your paintings." I didn't mention that I'd gone three times.

"Well, thank you." He said nothing more; I had just learned something else about him, which was that he didn't like to comment on people's comments on his work.

"I actually had a lot of questions for you about one of them," I hazarded. "I mean, I was very curious about some things you did in it and I wished you'd been there to ask on the spot."

A strangeness crossed his face then; it was slight--a thin, fine cloud across the spring day, and I never knew whether he'd guessed which painting I was going to name or whether it was my "I wished you'd been there" that sent through him--what? A premonitory shiver? Doesn't every love express itself this way, with the seeds of both its flowering and its ruin in the very first words, the first breath, the first thought? He frowned and looked attentively at me. I wondered whether the attention was for me or for something just outside the frame. "You can ask me," he said a little shortly. Then he smiled. "Would you like to sit down for a moment?" He glanced around and so did I--the chairs and tables at the back of the student cafe were in plain view on the other side of the quad. "How about there?" he asked. "I was thinking of taking a break and having some lemonade."

We ate lunch instead, sitting outside among the students and their backpacks, some of them studying for exams, some talking in the sunshine, stirring coffee. Robert had an enormous tuna sandwich with pickles and an overflow of potato chips on the side, and I had a salad. He insisted on paying for the meal, and I insisted on buying us two big paper cups of lemonade--out of a roiling tank, but still it was good. We ate in silence at first. I'd turned in my final painting, we'd said good-bye at the last class, and although I was waiting now for the moment to ask him about Oil on Canvas, it felt to me as if we might already be something like friends, since we were no longer instructor and student. I dismissed this thought as presumptuous the minute it occurred to me; he was a great master and I was a nobody with a little talent. I hadn't fully noticed the birds before then--that they had returned after the snowbound winter--or the brightness of the trees and buildings, the latticed windows of the dining hall thrown open to let in spring.

Robert lit a cigarette, apologizing first. "I don't usually smoke," he said. "I just got a pack this week, to celebrate. I'm not planning to buy any more. It's once a year." He went back into the cafe to get an ashtray, and when he came out he settled himself in his chair and said, "All right, go ahead, but you know I don't usually answer questions about my paintings." I hadn't known; I wanted to say that I didn't know a thing about him. He looked amused, however, or prepared to be amused, and his eyes seemed to register my hair when I pushed it over my shoulders--it still reached my waist, then, and it was still blond, my natural color.

But he said nothing else, so I had to speak. "Does that mean I shouldn't ask you?"

"You can ask me, but I might not answer, that's all. I don't think painters have the answers about their own paintings. No one knows anything about a painting except the painting itself. Anyway, a painting has to have some kind of mystery to it to make it work."

I drank the last of my lemonade, gathering courage. "I liked all your paintings a lot. The landscapes are really wonderful." I was too young, then, to know how this might sound to a genius, but at least I knew better than to say anything about the self-portrait. "What I wanted to ask you about is that big one, with the woman sitting on the sofa. I assume she's your wife, but she's wearing this incredible, old-fashioned kind of dress. What's the story behind that?"

He looked at me again, but this time he was absent, guarded. "The story?"

"Yes. I mean, it's so detailed--the window and the mirror--it's so complicated and she seems completely alive. Did she sit for you, or did you maybe use a photograph?"

He was looking through me, apparently all the way through to the stone wall behind me, the wall of the student union. "She's not my wife, and I don't use photographs." His voice was mild, if distant, and he drew on his cigarette. He examined his other hand on the table, flexing the fingers, massaging the joints: a painter's long slide toward arthritis, I understood later. When he glanced up again, his eyes were narrowed, but this time on me, not on some vague horizon. "If I tell you who she is, will you keep it a secret?"

Something prickled in me at this, the sort of horror you feel as a child when an adult proposes to tell you something adult--to report some private sorrow, for example, or a financial problem that you've already guessed but should be allowed to ignore for a few years more of childhood, or something, God forbid, frightening, sexual. Was he going to tell me about a hidden, sordid love life? Middle-aged people had such things sometimes, although they were too old for them and ought to know better. How much sweeter it was to be young and free and allowed to flaunt one's affections and mistakes and body. It was my habit to pity everyone over thirty, and I cruelly made no exception for weather-beaten Robert Oliver with his single springtime cigarette.

"Sure," I said, although my heart beat fast. "I can keep a secret."

"Well--" He tapped his ash into the borrowed tray. "The truth is that I don't know who she is." He blinked rapidly. "Oh God," he said, his voice full of despair. "If I just knew who she was!"

This was so surprising, so unanswerable, so chilling and weird, that I said nothing for a few moments; I almost pretended he hadn't uttered that last line. I simply couldn't figure it out, didn't know how to respond. How could he paint someone and not know who she was? I'd assumed he worked from friends or from his wife or hired models whenever he wanted to, that people sat for him. Could he have pulled some gorgeous woman off the street, like

Picasso? I didn't want to ask him outright, to expose my confusion and ignorance. Then a possibility occurred to me. "Do you mean you imagined her?"

He looked grim this time, and I wondered if I liked him after all. Maybe he was mean, in fact. Or crazy. "Oh, she's real, in a way." Then he smiled, to my ineffable relief, although I felt vaguely offended, too. He knocked a second cigarette out of his package. "Would you like another lemonade?"

"No, thank you," I said. My pride was hurt; he'd posed an agonized mystery without giving me even a clue, and he seemed to feel no sense of having excluded me, his student, his lunch guest, the girl with the beautiful hair. There was something scary about it, too. I had the idea that if he could explain to me what he'd meant by these strange statements, I would instantly be enlightened about the nature of painting, the miracle of art, but obviously he'd assumed I couldn't understand. Part of me didn't want to know his weird secrets, but at the same time it stung. I put my cup and the white plastic fork neatly on my plate, as if I were at one of Muzzy's friends' little dinner parties. "I'm sorry--I have to get back to the library. Exams." I stood up, defiant in my jeans and boots--taller, for once, than my instructor, since he was still seated. "Thank you so much for the lunch. That was very nice of you." I gathered up my garbage without looking at him.

He stood, too, and stopped me with a large gentle hand on my arm, so that I put down the plate again. "You're angry," he said, with a kind of wonder in his voice. "What have I done to upset you? Was it that I didn't answer your question?"

"I can't blame you for thinking I wouldn't understand your answer," I said stiffly, "but why did you play with me? Either you know the woman or you don't, right?" His hand was miraculously warm through the sleeve of my blouse; I didn't want him to remove it, ever, but a second later he did.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I was telling you the truth--I don't understand who the woman really is, in my painting." He sat down again, and he didn't need to gesture: I sat down with him, slowly. He shook his head, staring at the table with its smear of what appeared to be bird droppings at one edge. "I can't explain this even to my wife--I think she wouldn't want to hear about it. I encountered this woman years ago, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a crowded room. I was working on a show that was all paintings of young ballet dancers, some of them really just children, in New York--they were so perfect, like little birds. And I started going to the Met to see a lot of Degas, as a reference, because obviously he was one of the master painters of dance, probably the greatest ever."

I nodded proudly; this time I knew.

"I saw her one of the last times I went to the museum, before we moved to Greenhill, and I just could never shake the image of her from my mind. Never. I couldn't forget her."

"She must have been beautiful," I hazarded.

"Very," he said. "And not only beautiful." He seemed lost, back at the museum, staring at a woman in a crowd who vanished a second later; I could sense the romance of the moment, and I felt a continued envy of the stranger who'd lingered in his mind so long. It didn't occur to me until later that even Robert Oliver couldn't have memorized a face that quickly.

"Didn't you go back to try to find her?" I hoped he hadn't.

"Oh, of course. I saw her a couple more times, and then I never saw her again."

An unrealized romance. "Then you started imagining her," I prompted.

This time he smiled at me, and warmth spread down the back of my neck. "Well, I guess you were correct to begin with. I guess I did." He stood again, reassured and reassuring, and we walked companionably back to the front of the student union. He paused in the sunshine and put out his hand. "Have a good summer, Mary. Best of luck with your studies in the fall. I'm sure you're going to do fine work if you keep at it."

"And you, too," I replied miserably, smiling. "I mean, good luck with your teaching--your work. You're going back to North Carolina right away?"

"Yes, yes, next week." He bent and kissed my cheek, as if saying good-bye to the whole campus and every one of his students there, and to the wintry north, all in the convenient form of me. The impersonality of it winded me. His lips were warm and pleasantly dry.

"Well, bye," I said, and I wheeled around, made myself walk off. The only surprising thing was that I didn't hear him turn and walk the other way; I felt him there for a long time, and I was too proud to look back. I thought he was probably standing there, staring down at his feet or the sidewalk, lost in his vision of the woman he'd glimpsed a few times in New York, or perhaps daydreaming of his wife and children at home. He was surely excited about leaving all this and going back to his family and his real life. But he had also told me, I can't explain this even to my wife. I'd received his random attempt to say something about his vision; I had been privileged. It stayed with me, as the face of a stranger had stayed with him.